London Pride Or When the World Was Younger Part 18

"I am a fantastical person, perhaps, Sir Ralph; but I would rather my wife saw ten of Shakespeare's plays-in spite of their occasional coa.r.s.eness-than one of your modern comedies."

"I should revolt against such tyranny," said Lady Sarah. "I have always appreciated Shakespeare, but I adore a witty comedy, and I never allowed my husband to dictate to me on a question of taste."

"Plays which her Majesty patronises can scarcely be unfit entertainment for her subjects," remarked another lady.

"Our Portuguese Queen is an excellent judge of the niceties of our language," said Fareham. "I question if she understands five sentences in as many acts."

"Nor should I understand anything low or vulgar," said Hyacinth.

"Then, madam, you are best at home, for the whole entertainment would be Hebrew to you."

"That cannot be," protested Lady Sarah; "for all our plays are written by gentlemen. The hack writers of King James's time have been shoved aside. It is the mark of a man of quality to write a comedy."

"It is a pity that fine gentlemen should write foul jests. Nay, it is a subject I can scarce speak of with patience, when I remember what the English stage has been, and hear what it is; when I recall what Lord Clarendon has told me of his Majesty's father, for whom Shakespeare was a closet companion, who loved all that was n.o.blest in the drama of the Elizabethan age. Time, which should have refined and improved the stage, has sunk it in ignominy. We stand alone among nations in our wors.h.i.+p of the obscene. You have seen plays enough in Paris, Hyacinth. Recall the themes that pleased you at the Marais and the Hotel de Bourgogne; the stories of cla.s.sic heroism, of Christian fort.i.tude, of manhood and womanhood lifted to the sublime. You who, in your girlhood, were familiar with the austere genius of Corneille--"

"I am sick of that Frenchman's name," interjected Lady Sarah. "St. evremond was always praising him, and had the audacity to p.r.o.nounce him superior to Dryden; to compare Cinna with the Indian Queen."

"A comparison which makes one sorry for Mr. Dryden," said Fareham. "I have heard that Conde, when a young man, was affected to tears at the scene between Augustus and his foe."

"He must have been very young," said Lady Fareham. "But I am not going to depreciate Corneille, or to pretend that the French theatre is not vastly superior to our own. I would only protest that if our laughter-loving King prefers farce to tragedy, and rhyme to blankverse, his subjects should accommodate themselves to his taste, and enjoy the plays he likes. It is a foolish prejudice that deprives me of such a pleasure. I could always go in a mask."

"Can you put a mask upon your mind, and preserve that unstained in an atmosphere of corruption? Indeed, your ladys.h.i.+p does not know what you are asking for. To sit and simper through a comedy in which the filthiest subjects are discussed in the vilest language; to see all that is foolish or lascivious in your own s.e.x exaggerated with a malignant licence, which makes a young and beautiful woman an epitome of all the vices, uniting the extreme of masculine profligacy with the extreme of feminine silliness. Will you encourage by your presence the wretches who libel your s.e.x? Will you sit smiling to see your sisters in the pillory of satire?"

"I should smile as at a fairy tale. There are no such women among my friends--"

"And if the satire hits an enemy, it is all the more pungent," said Lady Sarah.

"An enemy! The man who can so write of women is your worst enemy. The day will come, perhaps, long after we are dust, when the women in Epsom Wells will be thought pictures from life. 'Such an one,' people will say, as they stand to read your epitaph, 'was this Lady Sarah, whose virtues are recorded here in Latin superlatives. We know her better in the pages of Shadwell.'"

Lady Sarah paled under her rouge at that image of a tomb, as Fareham's falcon eye singled her out in the light-hearted group of which De Malfort was the central figure, sitting on the marble bal.u.s.trade, in an easy impertinent att.i.tude, swinging his legs, and dandling his guitar. She was less concerned at the thought of what posterity might say of her morals than at the idea that she must inevitably die.

"Not a word against Shad," protested Sir Ralph. "I have roared with laughter at his last play. Never did any one so hit the follies of town and country. His rural Put is perfection; his London rook is to the very life."

"And if the generality of his female characters conduct themselves badly there is always one heroine of irreproachable morals," said Lady Sarah.

"Who talks like a moral dragoon," said Fareham.

"Oh, dem, we must have the play-houses!" cried Masaroon. "Consider how dull town is without them. They are the only a.s.semblies that please quality and riffraff alike. Sure 'tis the nature of wit to bubble into licentiousness, as champagne foams over the rim of a gla.s.s; and, after all, who listens to the play? Half the time one is talking to some adventurous miss, who will swallow a compliment from a stranger if he offer it with a china orange. Or, perhaps, there is quarrelling; and all our eyes and ears are on the scufflers. One may ogle a pretty actress on the stage; but who listens to the play, except the cits and commonalty?"

"And even they are more eyes than ears," said Lady Sarah, "and are gazing at the King and Queen, or the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess, when they should be 'following an intrigue by Shadwell or Dryden."

"Pardieu!" exclaimed De Malfort, "there are tragedies and comedies in the boxes deeper and more human than anything that is acted on the stage. To watch the Queen, sitting silent and melancholy, while Madame Barbara lolls across half a dozen people to talk to his Majesty, dazzling him with her brilliant eyes, bewildering him by her daring speech. Or, on other nights to see the same lady out of favour, sitting apart, with an ivory shoulder turned towards Royalty, scowling at the audience like a thunder-cloud."

"Well, it is but natural, perhaps, that such a Court should inspire such a stage," returned Fareham, "and that for the heroic drama of Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Ma.s.singer, and Ford, we should have a gross caricature of our own follies and our own vices. Nay, so essential is foulness to the modern stage that when the manager ventures a serious play, he takes care to introduce it with some filthy prologue, and to spice the finish with a filthier epilogue."

"Zounds, Fareham!" cried Masaroon, "when one has yawned or slept through five acts of dull heroics, one needs to be stung into wakefulness by a high-spiced epilogue. For my taste your epilogue can't be too pungent to give a flavour to my oysters and Rhenish. Gud, my lord, we must have something to talk about when we leave the play-house!"

"His lords.h.i.+p is spoilt; we are all spoilt for London after having lived in the most exquisite city in the world," drawled Mrs. Danville, one of Lady Fareham's particular friends, who had been educated at the Visitandines with the Princess Henrietta, now d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans. "Who can tolerate the coa.r.s.e manners and sea-coal fires of London after the smokeless skies and exquisite courtesies of Parisian good company in the Rue St. Thomas du Louvre-a society so refined that a fault in grammar shocks as much as a slit nose at Charing Cross? I shudder when I recall the Sat.u.r.days in the Rue du Temple, and compare the conversations there, the play of wit and fancy, the elaborate arguments upon platonic love, the graceful raillery, with any a.s.sembly in London-except yours, Hyacinth. At Fareham House we breathe a finer air, although his lords.h.i.+p's esprit moqueur will not allow us any superiority to the coa.r.s.e English mob."

"Indeed, Mrs. Danville, even your prejudice cannot deny London fine gentlemen and wits," remonstrated Sir Ralph. "A court that can boast a Buckhurst, a Rochester, an Etherege, a Sedley--"

"There is not one of them can compare with Voiture or G.o.deau, with Bussy or St. evremond, still less with Scarron or Moliere," said De Malfort. "I have heard more wit in one evening at Scarron's than in a week at Whitehall. Wit in France has its basis in thought and erudition. Here it is the sparkle and froth of empty minds, a trick of speech, a knack of saying brutal things under a pretence of humour, varnis.h.i.+ng real impertinence with mock wit. I have heard Rowley laugh at insolences which, addressed to Louis, would have ensured the speaker a year in the Bastille."

"I would not exchange our easy-tempered King for your graceful despot," said Fareham. "Pride is the mainspring that moves Louis' self-absorbed soul. His mother instilled it into his mind almost before he could speak. He was bred in the belief that he has no more parallel or fellow than the sun which he has chosen for his emblem. And then, for moral worth, he is little better than his cousin, Louis has all Charles's elegant vices, plus tyranny."

"Louis is every inch a King. Your easy-tempered gentleman at Whitehall is only a tradition," answered De Malfort. "He is but an extravagantly paid official, whose office is a sinecure, and who sells something of his prerogative every session for a new grant of money. I dare adventure, by the end of his reign, Charles will have done more than Cromwell to increase the liberty of the subject and to demonstrate the insignificance of kings."

"I doubt the easy-tempered sinecurist who trusts the business of the State to the nation's representatives will wear longer than your officious tyrant, who wants to hold all the strings in his own fingers."

"He may do that safely, so long as he has men like Colbert for puppets--"

"Men!" cried Fareham. "A man of so rare an honesty must not be thought of in the plural. Colbert's talent, probity, and honour const.i.tute a phoenix that appears once in a century; and, given those rare qualities in the man, it needs a Richelieu to inspire the minister, and a Mazarin to teach him his craft, and to prepare him for double-dealing in others which his own direct mind could never have imagined. Trained first by one of the greatest, and next by one of the subtlest statesmen the world has ever seen, the provincial woollen-draper's son has all the qualities needed to raise France to the pinnacle of fortune, if his master will but give him a free hand."

"At any rate, he will make Jacques Bonhomme pay handsomely for his Majesty's new palaces and new loves," said De Malfort. "Colbert adores the King, and is blind to his follies, which are no more economical than the vulgar pleasures of your jovial Rowley."

"Who takes four s.h.i.+llings in every country gentleman's pound to spend on the pleasures of London," interjected Masaroon. "Royalty is plaguey expensive."

The company sighed a melancholy a.s.sent.

"And one can never tell whether the money they squeeze out of us goes to build a new s.h.i.+p, or to pay Lady Castlemaine's gambling debts," said Lady Sarah.

"Oh, no doubt the lady, as Hyde calls her, has her t.i.thes," said De Malfort. "I have observed she always flames in new jewels after a subsidy."

"Royal accounts should be kept so that every tax-payer could look into them," said Masaroon. "The King has spent millions. We were all so foolishly fond of him in the joyful day of his restoration that we allowed him to wallow in extravagance, and asked no questions; and for a man who had worn threadbare velvet and tarnished gold, and lived upon loans and gratuities from foreign princes and particulars, it was a new sensation to draw ad libitum upon a national exchequer."

"The exchequer Rowley draws upon should be as deep and wide as the river Pactolus; for he is a spendthrift by instinct," said Fareham.

"Yet his largest expenditure can hardly equal his cousin's drain upon the revenue. Mansart is spending millions on Versailles, with his b.a.s.t.a.r.d Italian architecture, his bloated garlands and festoons, his stone lilies and pomegranates. Charles builds no palaces, initiates no war--"

"And will leave neither palace nor monument; will have lived only to have diminished the dignity and importance of his country. Restored to kingdom and power as if by a miracle, he makes it his chief business to show Englishmen how well they could have done without him," said Denzil Warner, who had been hanging over Angela's tea-table until just now, when they both sauntered on to the terrace, the lady's office being fulfilled, the little Chinese teapot emptied of its costly contents, and the tiny tea-cups distributed among the modish few who relished, or pretended to relish, the new drink.

"You are a Republican, Sir Denzil, fostered by an arrant demagogue!" exclaimed Masaroon, with a contemptuous shake of his shoulder ribbons. "You hate the King because he is a King."

"No, sir, I despise him because he is so much less than a King. n.o.body could hate Charles the Second. He is not big enough."

"Oh, dem, we want no meddlesome Kings to quarrel with their neighbours, and set Europe by the ears! The treaty of the Pyrenees may be a fine thing for France; but how many n.o.ble gentlemen's lives it cost, to say nothing of the common people! Rowley is the finest gentleman in his kingdom, and the most good-natured. Eh, gud, sirs! what more would you have?"

"A MAN-like Henry the Fifth, or Oliver Cromwell, or Elizabeth."

"Faith, she had need possess the manly virtues, for she must have been an untowardly female-a sour, lantern-jawed spinster, with all the inclinations but none of the qualities of a coquette."

"Greatness has the privilege of small failings, or it would scarce be human. Elizabeth and Julius Caesar might be excused some harmless vanities."

The spring evenings were now mild enough for promenading St. James's Park, and the Mall was crowded night after night by the finest company in London. Hyacinth walked in the Mall, and appeared occasionally in her coach in Hyde Park; but she repeatedly reminded her friends how inferior was the mill-round of the Ring to the procession of open carriages along the Cours la Reine, by the side of the Seine; the splendour of the women's dress, outshone sometimes by the extravagant decoration of their coaches and the richness of their liveries; the crowds of hors.e.m.e.n, the finest gentlemen in France, riding at the coach doors, and bandying jests and compliments with Beauty, enthroned in her triumphal chariot. Gay, joyous sunsets; light laughter; delicate feasting in Renard's garden, hard by the Tuileries. To remember that fairer and different scene was to recall the freshness of youth, the romance of a first love.

Here in the Mall there was gaiety enough and to spare. A crowd of fine people that sometimes thickened to a mob, hustled by the cits and starveling poets who came to stare at them.

Yet, since St. James's Park was fas.h.i.+on's favourite promenade, Lady Fareham affected it, and took a turn or two nearly every evening, alighting from her chair at one gate and returning to it at another, on her way to rout or dance. She took Angela with her; and De Malfort and Sir Denzil were generally in attendance upon them, Denzil's devotion stopping at nothing except a proposal of marriage, for which he had not mustered courage in a friends.h.i.+p that had lasted half a year.

"Because there was one so favoured as Endymion, am I to hope for the moon to come down and give herself to me?" he said one day, when Lady Fareham rebuked him for his reticence. "I know your sister does not love me; yet I hang on, hoping that love will come suddenly, like the coming of spring, which is ever a surprise. And even if I am never to win her, it is happiness to see her and to talk with her. I will not spoil my chance by rashness; I will not hazard banishment from her dear company."